Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
Hillsong United performed on the TODAY show. (Facebook)
Join us on the new C-Pop podcast where Taylor and Jessilyn discuss, debate and sometimes deride pop culture with a strong sense of humor and a focus on Christ. Listen at charismapodcastnetwork.com.
WATCH: Holy Spirit Falls on 'TODAY' Show as Hillsong Performs 'Oceans'
When members of Hillsong United asked the Spirit to lead them to where their trust was without borders, it's doubtful they expected to perform live on the TODAY show for Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb.
Lead vocalist Taya Smith led the worship band in one of today's most popular praise anthems as the hosts looked on with tear-filled eyes.
The group was on a press tour for their new film, Hillsong: Let Hope Rise.
Watch the video to see more.
3 Reasons Why you should read Life in the Spirit. 1) Get to know the Holy Spirit. 2) Learn to enter God's presence 3) Hear God's voice clearly! Go deeper!
Has God called you to be a leader? Ministry Today magazine is the source that Christian leaders who want to serve with passion and purpose turn to. Subscribe now and receive a free leadership book.
Has God called you to be a leader? Ministry Today magazine is the source that Christian leaders who want to serve with passion and purpose turn to. Subscribe now and receive a free leadership book.
“And He said unto me: ‘Son of man this is the place of My throne and the place of the soles of My feet where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Yisrael for ever.’” Ezekiel 43:7 (The Israel Bible™)
An incredible new discovery at the Temple Mount has produced the first-ever physical and archaeological evidence that the Jewish Second Temple stood on the Mount 2,000 years ago, upsetting Arab claims, increasingly endorsed by the international community, that the Temples never existed.
Archaeologists from the Temple Mount Sifting Project, salvaging artifacts from Muslim destruction at the Temple complex, have completed the restoration of ornate floor tiles which experts believe likely decorated the courtyard of the Second Jewish Temple. The project provides visible and incontrovertible proof, backed up by ancient texts and historical context, of a Jewish Temple on the Mount.
In total, archaeological teams have uncovered approximately 600 colored stone floor tile segments, with more than 100 of them positively dated to the Herodian Second Temple period (37-4 BCE).
An eight-pointed star floor tile from the Second Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project/Zachi Dvira)
The importance of the discovery is undeniable.
“This represents the first time that archeologists have been able to successfully restore an element from the Herodian Second Temple complex,” said Zachi Dvira, co-founder and director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project.
The Sifting Project began in the Tzurim Valley National Park in 2004 in an attempt to salvage whatever archaeological artifacts it could from destruction caused by illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount led by the Jordanian Waqf that controls the Mount.
This destruction of irreplaceable archaeological artifacts is considered to be part of a larger trend of Temple denial. Denying Jewish connection to the Temple Mount began at the 2000 Camp David Summit, when the Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat insisted that “the Temple” existed near Shechem (Nablus), and not on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
This claim has been taken up in the international narrative as UNESCO passed an initiative claiming the Temple Mount as an exclusively Muslim holy site. This claim went mainstream last October when the New York Times published an article questioning whether the two Jewish Temples ever existed at all.
An eight-pointed star floor tile from the Second Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project/Zachi Dvira)
Breaking Israel News asked Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder and director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, if this first-of-its-kind restoration was absolute proof refuting Temple denial.
“You are asking me if I have proof that water is wet,” he responded emphatically. “I don’t need to prove anything. I found facts.”
Dr. Barkay compared denial of the Jewish Temples to denying the Holocaust. “I myself am a Holocaust survivor, and I couldn’t care less about people who deny what I know to be true. For the Holocaust, we have the camps, we have the films and photographs, and we have the survivors,” he told Breaking Israel News.
“For the Temple, we have the Mishnah (Oral Law), the New Testament, we have the writings of Flavius Josephus (a 1st Century Romano-Jewish historian). We have mountains of archaeological evidence. I don’t want to relate to what is nothing less than a political misuse of history.
“There are people who approach me, especially Europeans, and ask what proof I have there was a Jewish Temple. I say that I don’t have proof and I am not interested in proof,” Dr. Barkay stated. “The fact is there was a Temple. Our discovery simply shows the glory that was the Temple.”
Speaking of proof, the tiles fit perfectly into a description of the Temple complex given by historian Josephus, who saw Temple with his own eyes. He wrote in his work “The Jewish Wars” that “the uncovered [Temple Mount courtyard] was completely paved with stones of various types and colors”.
The find also agrees with Talmudic literature about the construction of the Temple Mount which describes rows of green, blue and white marble. The tile segments, mostly imported from Rome, Asia Minor, Tunisia and Egypt, were made from polished multicolored stones cut in a variety of geometric shapes.
Floor tiles from the Second Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project/Zachi Dvira)
Another point of historical proof is that this style of flooring is consistent with floors found in contemporary works built by Herod, the builder of the Second Temple. Similar flooring has been found at Herod’s palaces in Masada, Herodian, and Jericho, among others. A key characteristic of the Herodian tiles is their size, which corresponds to the Roman foot, approximately 29.6 cm.
The restoration is proof of a theory that large expanses of the Temple Mount during the Second Temple were covered with a special type of ornate flooring called opus sectile, Latin for “cut work.” The idea was first put forward in 2007 by archaeologist Assaf Avraham, director of the Jerusalem Walls National Park. The new discovery confirms it.
“So far, we have succeeded in restoring seven potential designs of the majestic flooring that decorated the buildings of the Temple Mount,” said Frankie Snyder, a member of the Temple Mount Sifting Project’s team of researchers and an expert in the study of ancient Herodian style flooring, explaining that there were no opus sectile floors in Israel prior to the time of King Herod. “The tile segments were perfectly inlaid such that one could not even insert a sharp blade between them.”
Floor tile from the Second Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project/Zachi Dvira)
Dr. Barkay noted that not only is the find an archaeological treasure, but a way for Jews to connect to their holiest place, which today’s generations can only imagine.
“This represents the first time that we can see with our own eyes the splendor of the flooring that decorated the Second Temple and its annexes 2,000 years ago,” said Dr. Barkay.
“Referring to the Temple that Herod built, the Talmud says that ‘Whoever has not seen Herod’s building has not seen a beautiful building in his life’. Though we have not merited seeing the Temple in its glory, with the discovery and restoration of these unique floor tiles, we are now able to have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the Second Temple, even through this one distinctive characteristic.”
Temple Mount Sifting Project team member with the Second Temple floor tiles. (Temple Mount Sifting Project/Zachi Dvira)
Posted: 05 Sep 2016 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
Why does it seem like almost everything is made in China these days? Yesterday I was looking at some pencils that we had laying around the house and I noticed that they had been manufactured in China. I remarked to my wife that it was such a shame that they don’t make pencils in the United States anymore.
At another point during the day, I turned over my television remote and I noticed that it also had “Made In China” engraved on it. It is still Labor Day as I write this article, and so I think that it is quite appropriate to write about our transition from an industrial economy to a paper economy today.
Since the year 2000, the United States has lost five million manufacturing jobs even though our population has grown substantially since that time. Manufacturing in America is in a state of stunning decline, our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted, and our formerly great manufacturing cities are in an advanced state of decay. We consume far more wealth than we produce, and the only way that we are able to do this is by taking on massive amounts of debt.
But is our debt-based paper economy sustainable in the long run?
Back in 1960, 24 percent of all American workers worked in manufacturing. Today, that number has shriveled all the way down to just 8 percent. CNN is calling it “the Great Shift”…
In 1960, about one in four American workers had a job in manufacturing. Today fewer than one in 10 are employed in the sector, according to government data.
Call it the Great Shift. Workers transitioned from the fields to the factories. Now they are moving from factories to service counters and health care centers. The fastest growing jobs in America now are nurses, personal care aides, cooks, waiters, retail salespersons and operations managers.
No wonder the middle class is shrinking so rapidly. There aren’t too many cooks, waiters or retail salespersons that can support a middle class family.
Since the turn of the century, we have lost more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of gleaming new factories have been erected in places like China.
Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
At this point, the total number of government employees in the United States exceeds the total number of manufacturing employees by almost 10 million…
Government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000.
The BLS has published seasonally-adjusted month-by-month employment data for both government and manufacturing going back to 1939. For half a century—from January 1939 through July 1989—manufacturing employment always exceeded government employment in the United States, according to these numbers.
You might be thinking that government jobs are “good jobs”, but the truth is that they don’t produce wealth. Government employees are really good at pushing paper around and telling other people what to do, but in most instances they don’t actually make anything.
In order to have a sustainable economy, you have got to have people creating and producing things of value. A debt-based paper economy may seem to work for a while, but eventually the whole thing inevitably comes crashing down when faith in the paper is lost.
Right now, the rest of the world is willing to send us massive amounts of stuff that they produce for our paper. So we keep producing more and more paper and we keep going into more and more debt, but at some point the gig will be up.
If we want to be a wealthy nation in the long-term, we have got to produce stuff. That is why the latest news from Caterpillar is so depressing. In addition to the thousands of layoffs that had been previously announced by the industrial machinery giant, it appears that a fresh wave of layoffs has arrived…
Hundreds of mostly office employees received layoff notices at one of the largest Caterpillar Inc. facilities in the Peoria area this week, just as the company announced plans to close overseas production plants and eliminate thousands more positions.
A total of 300 support and management employees at Building AC and the Tech Center in Mossville this week received job loss notifications that included severance packages, 60 days notice and mandated Illinois Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act letters.
During this election season, you will hear many of our politicians talk about how good “free trade” is for the global economy. But that is only true if the trade is balanced.
Unfortunately, we have been running a yearly trade deficit of between 400 billion dollars and 600 billion dollars for many years…
When you have got about half a trillion dollars more going out than you have coming in year after year that has severe consequences.
Let me try to break it down very simply.
Imagine that I am the United States and you are China. I take one dollar out of my wallet and I give it to you and then you send me some stuff.
After a while, I want more stuff, so I take another dollar out of my wallet and send it to you in exchange for more products.
But that stuff only lasts for so long, and so pretty soon I find myself taking another dollar out of my wallet and giving it to you for even more stuff.
Ultimately, who is going to end up with all the money?
It isn’t a big mystery as to how China ended up with so much money. And when we can’t pay our bills we have to go and beg them to let us borrow some of the money that we sent to them in the first place. Since we pay interest on that borrowed money, that makes China even richer.
This is why I am so obsessed with these trade issues. They truly are at the very heart of our long-term economic problems.
But most Americans don’t understand these things, and they seem to think that our debt-based paper economy can just keep rolling along indefinitely.
In the end, history will be the judge as to who was right and who was wrong.
Pastor Jim and Lori Bakker discuss Rabbi Cahn’s new book The Book of Mysteries with special guest Rabbi Jonathan Cahn.
Quotes
Every time you choose the higher road, and sometimes it’s harder, choose the higher step, it’s going to lift you not only higher, but closer to the destiny that God has. – Rabbi Cahn
What do you see at the end of the Bible? The marriage. What happens after the marriage? The 2 become one. Us and God. It begins now. – Rabbi Cahn
Scriptures
I John 2:2 NIV He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.
II Corinthians 5:21 NIV God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
John 5:1 NIV Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.
Isaiah 9:10 NIV “The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled,but we will replace them with cedars.”
Isaiah 9:10 KJV The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars.
Isaiah 9:18 NIV Surely wickedness burns like a fire;it consumes briers and thorns, it sets the forest thickets ablaze, so that it rolls upward in a column of smoke.
Leviticus 23:2 NIV “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘These are my appointed festivals, the appointed festivals of the Lord, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies.
Matthew 11:15 MEV He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
II Timothy 3:4 MEV traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,
Revelation 21:4 NIV ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Joel 2:25 MEV And I will compensate you for the years the locusts have eaten— the larval locust, the hopper locust,and the fledging locust— My great army which I sent against you.
Matthew 18:20 KJV For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
More than 30,000 people from "countries of terrorist concern" illegally entered the United States across the southern border with Mexico in 2015, says a U.S. Southern Command intelligence report.
National security officials in Washington are now increasingly concerned ISIS may be working to get jihadists into the U.S. using Latin American smuggling networks.
"Sunni extremists are infiltrating the United States with the help of alien smugglers in South America and are crossing U.S. borders with ease," reports veteran national security correspondent Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon. "The Command’s J-2 intelligence directorate reported recently in internal channels that 'special interest aliens' are working with a known alien smuggling network in Latin America to reach the United States.
Excerpts from Gertz's article:
Army Col. Lisa A. Garcia, a Southcom spokeswoman, did not address the intelligence report directly but said Sunni terrorist infiltration is a security concern,.
“Networks that specialize in smuggling individuals from regions of terrorist concern, mainly from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, the Middle East, and East Africa, are indeed a concern for Southcom and other interagency security partners who support our country’s national security,” Garcia told the Washington Free Beacon.
“There are major hubs that serve as entry points into the region for migrants from those areas of concern attempting to enter the U.S. along our border with Mexico,” she said.
The infiltrators from terrorist states and unstable regions exploit vulnerabilities in commercial transportation systems and immigration enforcement agencies in some of the countries used for transit, Garcia said.
“In 2015, we saw a total of 331,000 migrants enter the southwestern border between the U.S. and Mexico, of that we estimate more than 30,000 of those were from countries of terrorist concern,” she said.
Another problem in dealing with migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia is a lack of information among the governments of the countries used by potential terrorists for transit.
The exploitation of alien smuggling networks by terrorists until recently had been dismissed by both American security officials and private security experts as largely an urban myth.
However, the Southcom intelligence report revealed that the threat of Islamist terror infiltration is no longer theoretical.
“This makes the case for Trump’s wall,” said one American security official of the Southcom report. “These guys are doing whatever they want to get in the country.”....
At least a dozen Middle Easterners reached the Western Hemisphere through this alien smuggling ring that facilitated travel to Mexico, the Times reported, quoting internal government documents.The aliens involved Palestinians, Pakistanis, and the Afghan man with ties to the Taliban.
Some of the aliens were stopped before entering the United States but others succeeded in crossing the U.S. border....
The cost of getting into the United States can reach $400 or more per person, and the illegal immigrants are provided with transportation, covert smuggling contacts along routes into the country, as well as instructions on how to illegally cross the U.S. border. The instructions in the past have included armed guides who ferry illegal aliens across U.S.-Mexico border rivers on inner tubes.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified during a Senate hearing in February that Islamic State terrorists would try to infiltrate the United State posing as immigrants.
“That’s one technique they’ve used is taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow,” Clapper said. “As well, they also have available to them—and are pretty skilled at phony passports so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers as well.”
We pay tribute again to archivists and librarians who digitize their historical treasures. Pictures of these two paintings were found in the Ottoman Archives.
The first painting is by German artist Johann Martin Bernatz (1802-1878) who traveled in the Holy Land in 1836.
The second painting is by another German artist, Gustav Bauernfeind (1848-1904).
Jews Praying at the Wailing Wall by Gustav Bauernfeind. The Ottoman Archives provides a
date of 1888. (Author's digital photograph collection)
Bauernfeind moved to Jerusalem in 1898. He is buried in the German Templar Cemetery in Jerusalem. In 2007, his oil painting of the Wailing Wall sold for 4.5 Euros at Sotheby.
